I must first say that I really enjoyed this article, but I like Heidegger. This is a debate that I had been having with students and fellow teachers over last summer. The question was about whether students had become a scholar, and we had all these definitions and various expressions of what scholars are and what they do. The students considered the actions and the results as the proof of them being scholars, but I (and other teachers) argued with them that their checklists only work when there are tasks to be completed or grades. What would happen to them when there were no more tasks or structured results? They would then cease to be scholars, or they just cease to be students? If one's motivation is solely to get a grade or accomplish a task (or graduate medical school, etc.), then I think they are on the most basic level of whatever they wanted to do. They may not yet be the wholeness of what that object is, though. The scholar learns beyond the classroom, often playing role of teacher and student in pursuit of something he or she wants to understand, and the satisfaction is intrinsic. A student may be more dependent on a teacher and is influenced by external motivations. That is the difference between the student and the scholar. (My interpretation of our definitions.) One does, the other is. Superimpose this on doctors, lawyers, carpenters, teachers, etc., and see if you can tell the difference.

We didn't get very far with our students, but our goal was for all of them to become scholars. That required a shift in their paradigm and a taking on of something new while simultaneously giving up something old. It is indeed a process, and one that I feel is intangible and often unrecordable in education as it is in competition for those things deemed priority. There was a misperception that the scholars had the best grades, but that wasn't comprehensively true. There were some scholars who had the lowest grades for a variety of reasons, yet they got less spotlight. How do we encourage and support this BEING when we don't usually reward it? As educators, do we encourage the tension and resistance and have time in our scopes and sequences for BEING to take place?